English 198 - Spring, 2018

Class Information

Instructor: Bloom, Gina
Time: R 6:10-8:00pm
Location: 234 Cruess

Description

Teaching Shakespeare through Theatrical Performance and Digital Technology

This course provides a foundation for teaching Shakespeare in K-12 schools with a particular focus on how digital technology and theater-based activities can enhance students’ understanding of the plays. In addition to reading education theory on these topics, we will put this theory into practice. Our central focus will be the Shakespeare digital game Play the Knave, which brings together digital technology and theater-based activities in a unique way. Play the Knave provides a way apply what you learn through two forms of community engagement:
(1) visiting area schools to help facilitate teachers’ use of Play the Knave in their Shakespeare curriculum and assessing the impact of these lessons
(2) developing a suite of lesson plans and assignments that will help future teachers use Play the Knave in their classrooms. These materials will be published on the Play the Knave website teaching portal. Unlike much of the work you do for college classes, what you produce in this class will be public facing: the most important audience for your work is not the professor, but K-12 teachers.

To best serve the Knave project and the teachers who use it, we need to demonstrate that Play the Knave is pedagogically effective. Thus, as you produce teaching resources for Knave and as you work with the game in actual classrooms, you will be studying its effectiveness. Through this course, you will gain exposure to basic methods for collecting and analyzing classroom data. You will work in teams to formulate a research question that can be explored through your fieldwork in a local school, design a study to investigate the question, gather data at your school site, and write up a report on your findings. Case studies may be compiled and published on the Knave website or submitted to an Education journal. In addition to meeting each week with the full class group, you will be meeting weekly for an hour with your team.